Surveillance is not a new phenomenon—people have always paid close attention to strangers and unusual activities—but the increasing anonymity, mobility and scale of urban societies means that cameras are now taking on a role that was traditionally filled by people.
Many people experience a feeling of deep unease about visual surveillance of public spaces. The social critic David Lyon has drawn comparisons with Orwell's 1984 and with Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, a prison concept where the inmates are constantly exposed to the gaze of unseen observers. Michel Foucault has observed that society is becoming increasingly panoptic, with all our social actions exposed to many different kinds of invisible monitoring.
Despite our unease with surveillance, cameras now pervade the public sphere. The United Kingdom leads the world in this respect. Large parts of the road network are instrumented to detect speeding and traffic light violations. ATM machines gaze back at us. Town centres are routinely monitored by camera networks. Shops, lobbies, foyers, doorways, carparks, shopping arcades—a person can expect to appear on camera dozens of times each day.
Accompanying our feelings of unease is a contradictory, sometimes exhibitionist ambivalence: “reality television” programs exploit intrusive surveillance for popular entertainment. Members of the public are willing to expose the intimate details of their private lives using web casting.
We cannot expect a diminution in the extent of what Paul Virilio calls “The Vision Machine”. There are many threats to social order, and ubiquitous and unblinking gaze of the vision machine does have a useful social role.